Ahmedabad:Bharti Airtel (“Airtel”), India’s largest telecommunications service provider, today announced it major network roll-out plans for FY 2018-19 to further expand its high speed mobile data footprint across the state of Gujarat.

As a part of its network expansion program – Project LEAP, Airtel announced its plans to add more than 6000 new sites in FY 2018-19, along with an addition of more than 2000 KMs of optic fiber, in Gujarat Circle. While stepping up the data capacities and taking services deeper into rural and unconnected areas, the massive roll-out would mean addition of 16 new sites every day to Airtel’s future-ready network in Gujarat. This would further enhance the customer experience on India’s fastest network.

With this planned roll-out, number of Airtel’s mobile sites in Gujarat would go up by 25% to 29,000, further enhancing the speeds and voice qualities, the company said.

The addition of fresh optic fiber would extend its fiber backbone to 13,800 KMs, supporting the growth of high speed data services in the region, announced the company.

The expansion plan for FY 2018-19, the company said follows a busy FY 2017-18 which saw more than 6600 new sites being deployed in Gujarat, extending its mobile broadband footprint to 20000 towns and villages.

KC Narendran, Chief Executive Officer – Gujarat, Bharti Airtel Ltd, adds, “As India’s leading smartphone network, we have committed ourselves towards the availability of best-in-class mobile broadband experience to our users in the ever-buzzing state of Gujarat. We will continue to invest aggressively in the region and take our network capabilities to the next level with more than 29,000 mobile sites by the end of this financial year, ably backed by a scaled up and strengthened infrastructure. We remain fully committed to contributing towards the Government’s vision of Digital India with our enhanced speeds, reach and coverage.”

Network highlights of Airtel Gujarat:

• Platinum 3G services launched in Oct 2015

• High speed 4G services launched in Oct 2016

• VoLTE services launched in Oct 2017

• Fiber backbone – 11800 KMs

• Towns and villages covered by Airtel network– 20,000

• Towns and villages covered by Airtel 3G and 4G – 10,000

• 4G offered on FD LTE 1800 MHz and TD LTE 2300 MHz spectrum

• 3G offered on 2100 MHz spectrum